Super Committee

CG&G alum Bruce Bartlett emailed me to say that, rather than cancel the sequester as I recommended in a post yesterday, we should get the band back together and reconstitute the anything-but-super committee to give it another chance to come up with a deficit reduction plan.

Sorry, Bruce...But I just don't see the need to go there yet again.

How many federal budget commissions, special committees, advisory groups, and private negotiations do we need to fail before we admit they don't work? Think about just the past few years: The Biden-Cantor negotiations, the Obama-Boehner summit negotiations, the B-S (that is, Simpson-Bowles) commission, the anything-but-super committee, the gang of six -- fail, fail, fail, fail, fail.

A good friend who works for one of the largest military contractors sent me an email yesterday complaining about the sequester -- the spending cut scheduled to occur on January 2 that was triggered when the anything-but-super committee failed to agree last November on a deficit reduction plan -- that expressed grave concern about the impact the reduction will have on his area.

Most CG&G readers are too young to remember that what we now know as the National Football League was actually created by the merger in 1966 of the NFL with the American Football League.

The merger announcement was big news. But while fans focused on the championship game -- the Super Bowl -- between the two leagues that began in 1967, with one exception the actual merger didn't really happen until 1970 when the NFL and AFL became one league with two divisions.

The one thing that did happen almost instantly was that the NFL and AFl ended the bidding war for players that was costing the owners so much by beginning a common draft immediately. That common draft and the end to the bidding war was always the major motivation for the merger and it very likely would not have happened otherwise.

I had a report yesterday that a high Treasury official recently told some foreign central bankers not to worry and that the Super Committee could still reach a deal after November 23. I would point out that the Committee had plenty of time from it's appointment in mid-August until its failure to agree on any recommendations yesterday, and it had the benefit of the detailed recommendations of the Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Commission, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and others. The Super Committee's failure did not occur because it ran out of time; it occurred because House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) decided no deal was better than a deal which risked electoral defeat in 2012 and which offended their partisans with tax increases and entitlement cuts.